A few years ago at Teachers College, I took a course in Content Area Literacy with Professor Margorie Siegel. I really felt like I walked away with a much better understanding of what other content area classes look like in the K-12 world thanks to this course. Additionally, during this time, I learned about what is now one of my favorite tools to spice up a lesson or materials--Comic Life.

I think that this easy-to-use program has been well known by many educators for a number of years. The program is free (at least for the first 30 days), and I find it to be very intuitive. There are already a number of articles written that justify using and creating comics in the ESL/EFL or language classroom.

What I like to do is to create listening activities using this program. I had students watch a short documentary about my friend, Paul Miller, who had recently quit the internet for a year. Then, I took screenshots of the documentary to make a comic about it. I asked students to then fill in the speech bubbles in the comic using the information they had heard in the documentary. This seemed to really engage my students, and I think they liked the less traditional activity. Usually, we watch Ted Talks, take notes, and answer questions about the notes, so this was certainly going in a different direction for a listening activity. If you haven't yet checked out Comic Life, you should! Give yourself 20 minutes or so to play around with it--I think you'll be pleased by the creative assignments and activities you can make.